


Muscle Memory

by soldmysoul4wifi



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Tower, Blood, Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Domestic Avengers, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, M/M, Medication, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2014-10-28
Packaged: 2018-02-21 03:04:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2452403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soldmysoul4wifi/pseuds/soldmysoul4wifi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes he thinks he'll go insane. Sometimes he wakes up in the street with a knife in his hand, thinking he should report to someone, but who? Sometimes he wakes up screaming soundless screams, drenched in sweat from a dream he can't remember that only left behind a pervasive sense of wrong, wrong, wrong. Sometimes he spends days doing nothing, walking around like he's thinking or going somewhere, when really he doesn't even know he's moving.</p><p>He collapses twice from lack of food, and once from lack of sleep. He forgets what hunger's supposed to feel like, lets go of what sleep is supposed to bring. Sleep never brings him anything but screams of people he did or didn't or maybe killed when he was or wasn't himself, whoever himself was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Send Help

Sometimes he thinks he remembers things. Sometimes he swears he remembers something, but no words come to mind that can describe what he remembers. The snippets of memories are like clouds in the corner of the sky, or the crease of where a book was once, long ago, dog-eared. They haunt the back of his mind like cobwebs he can't quite reach to clean out.

He wishes he could visit the Smithsonian. He wishes he could keep going back to that exhibit that has pictures of the man he's supposed to be; but every time he sees it he gets those inklings again, like he should be doing something or thinking something or feeling something he's no longer capable of feeling. They wash over him until he's tumbling over and over in the waves, crashing into a sand he doesn't quite understand, and he ends up breathing heavy in a bathroom in front of a mirror he can't bear to look in.

He forgets to eat, sometimes, forgets to sleep, forget to drink water or find a bathroom every few hours. It's been so long since he needed any willpower that he lacks enough of it to even exist. If so much hate didn't run through his veins, fueled by confusion and emotions he doesn't have words for, he wonders if he would have the strength to function.

Sometimes days go by when he doesn't think of him. Sometimes he forgets him, for hours, and it's only an inkling that will remind him, will bring up that familiar feeling of redundancy; as if there's something he should know but doesn't.

Sometimes he thinks he'll go insane. Sometimes he wakes up in the street with a knife in his hand, thinking he should report to someone, but who? Sometimes he wakes up screaming soundless screams, drenched in sweat from a dream he can't remember that only left behind a pervasive sense of wrong, wrong, wrong. Sometimes he spends days doing nothing, walking around like he's thinking or going somewhere, when really he doesn't even know he's moving.

He collapses twice from lack of food, and once from lack of sleep. He forgets what hunger's supposed to feel like, lets go of what sleep is supposed to bring. Sleep never brings him anything but screams of people he did or didn't or maybe killed when he was or wasn't himself, whoever himself was.

He is a jumble of broken things pasted together with a dried out glue stick. Memories, real and fake and forgotten, layered one on top of the other and lit on fire until he's drowning in smoke; he's so lost he sometimes thinks he can be saved.

Then he wakes up with long-forgotten blood on his hands and banishes the thought when he sees the red glint off the metal.

He doesn't know how long it's been since he spoke or ate, and he's not sure if he's slept or even sat down. Time and everything in it seems to blur, and the only thing he is conscious of is the left arm, the metal that feels real, that twirls a knife like it's made of flesh and bone instead of cold metal that would make him ache if he remembered what ordinary aching felt like. The knife twirls and twirls and twirls and sometimes he throws it and sometimes he just watches it, he's that starved for something he can remember, can recall.

Muscle memory is the only thing that keeps him going. His arms remember the feel of pushups; fifty with the right, two hundred with the left. His fingers twirling the knife, the feel of the metal in his fingers, and sometimes he thinks the knife is cutting into him but he almost doesn't care, it doesn't hurt, it doesn't feel, why would he care. He remembers most of his legs, the feel of his legs, the way they move and twist and push until he's propelling himself forward. He remembers fighting, he remembers killing, and sometimes it feels like he wakes up and he finds himself with a knife at someone's neck, and the only thing that can stop him is the faded echo buried in his mind of the man he used to know.

For whatever unfortunate soul he's got under his knife, that echo sometimes comes too late.

 

\------------------------------------------

 

He survives on muscle memory for two months, letting his feet take him as far as they can go before they collapse beneath him. Everywhere he goes feels the same to him, like he's walking through a nightmare but hasn't yet gotten to the part that makes him wake up screaming.

Muscle memory doesn't put food in his belly, though, and the rumbling leaves something undeveloped in his stomach, like a memory he tries to swallow but can't keep down. It reminds him of an emotion he's unfamiliar with, an emotion that tastes like satisfaction, but that makes no sense, no sense.

He lives off short term memory some nights, drinking it in like it's all he's got left, because it is, it's all that tells him whether he's walking in a circle or a straight line, whether he's done ten pushups or a hundred. He lives off of it when muscle memory fails him. He wakes up one night with his metal arm wrapped around his own throat, and he spends an eternity coughing before he can breathe properly again.

It's another month almost before he manages to form a single coherent thought. It's like a ray of sunshine in a cloud of dust, and it makes him so ill he wants to vomit but he's not sure he has the strength to do anything but replay the thought over and over again in his mind like a broken record:

_He needs to find someone._

He spends forever stumbling around, letting the shattered pieces of memories clatter over him, hoping one of them might stab him and trickle into his blood and let him remember something, anything, because more than anything he's tired, tired, tired of this, this, this. He walks without knowing where he's going; talks to people without knowing what he's saying, but when they point him in a direction and say something back he knows that even his mouth has muscle memory.

It's raining when he finds his feet have brought him to New York. It looks familiarly alien, like someone painted over an old photograph he used to know by heart, and now there's only silver where brown used to be. The rain comes down like someone's pouring it over the city; for a moment there's a flicker of familiarity, a feeling of recognition when the drops hit his skin. It feels like a macabre mixture of anxiety and tranquility, and the feeling wraps around him. It's the most he's felt in three months that doesn't make him feel sick to his stomach, and if he still remembered how he might have felt hope.

His feet seem to have forgotten how to move. He exists in flashes of conscious thought, brought out of his nearly-comatose mind by the passing of a car or person. They all look the same to him, but he examines each face anyway, and they glue themselves into his mind as if it were a book to flip through when he needed to find something, and he doesn’t dare entertain the thought that he might not be able to open the book again.

It's dark when people stop passing by and cars stop passing by and the only thing that passes by is the fleeting feeling that he has lost something, is missing something, has to find something.

He stands on that corner for days, it seems, searching his mind. The sun rises and sets twice, but he despite the toll it surely takes on his body, he doesn't remember what aches in his legs or back are supposed to feel like. A man in a red shirt walks by and his presence dredges up lost inklings of places and people, until he's feeling the knives and guns in his hands, his finger pulling the trigger, trigger, trigger, and the people's blood on his fingers and in his mouth, it tasted like iron, it tasted like salt, but how did it get in his mouth when he used his hands, those hands, that hand and the metal monster, they wrapped around people's necks, wrapped around his neck, her neck, their neck, stuck them with knives, shot them, shot them, until blood poured like water, like milk, like vomit or juice or that disgusting soda he used to drink back in Brooklyn with—

He wakes up in a hospital and vomits emptily, retching and gagging because there's nothing in his stomach to throw up. The room feels white and clean and empty and cramped, like it's collapsing in on itself too slowing for him to watch or see, but he knows it is. It smells like antiseptic and makes him think of people in white coats with clipboards, pens, curious glances, gloves, circled around him like they're looking down at a lion in a pit and the pit is where he's strapped down, helpless, struggling against straps that shouldn't be able to hold him but he's so starved and weak and tired that somehow they can, and it's been hours and days and weeks and he wants to scream but he can't remember how, and then people flood into the room and he can't remember what he is, what he's doing, where he's supposed to be, and all he sees are the faces and people talking and yelling and grabbing him and then someone touches the arm—

He finds himself breathing heavily in the street behind the hospital, his skin so thickly covered with blood that he forgets for a moment what color he is underneath; the knife in his left hand is steady but the one in his right is shaking, like it's doubting itself. He's been clutching it too tightly for too long.

He's on his feet again in a moment, muscle memory pushes him forward.

He's back at the corner, the street corner in New York, in a part of the city where the skyscrapers block out the sun no matter where he stands or looks. His vision is blurred and his mouth is dry and the world tastes like dust and sand with a dash of disappointment, but he doesn't know why he's disappointed.

He stares up at the building, twirling that knife in his left hand because his right one is still shaking, and somewhere he hears people scream and he's not sure why until he sees the spatter on the sidewalk and he knows he's still drenched in blood.

Then his short term memory kicks in and he knows what happened, what he did, the people he killed, the white coats he splashed with blood when he slit the throats of four doctors, two nurses, and three security guards and it's funny to him that for all they bitched about black guys back in Brooklyn, the black doctor's blood is the same as the white doctor's blood on his face, in his mouth, in between his fingers, and he doesn't remember their faces, they're in his memory, in his mind, but he can't open it to pull them out and it's only white coats and nurses' scrubs and the one gun a security officer pulled on him that he can remember, and he wants to scream, so he does.

It's not raining anymore but the sky still twists with black and gray clouds like they'll fall any second and clatter like marbles against the metal arm.The skyscraper above him reflects the warped shapes of the sky, and for a while he watches them move and writhe, for hours and hours he does this.

"Hey! You're that guy! The guy that—"

The knife lodges itself in the civilian's throat before he knows he's thrown it. Muscle memory. The woman crumples, collapses, and he wipes the knife on her dress, leaves her purse and her wallet and her jewelry, why would he need them anyway, turns away when a puddle turning red catches the glint of her black heels.

His breath catches in his throat, inklings of strength and agility, hidden anxiety, twist together and pool into a jumble of black heels, red hair and white legs kicking, kicking, kicking, never winning, no, but getting better, getting faster, breaking necks and crushing skulls between her thighs; his breathing speeding up when she pins him down, left arm swinging so hard there's blood, spatter of blood across the floor, white skin and red blood, and a pang of remorse, but why, why remorse, does he even remember what remorse is, maybe, maybe he does because he plants a kiss on her lips, a pathetic apology for the blood on his left, metal monster of an arm—

He gasps for air like he's drowning, feels his lungs contract, sucking in emptiness. A woman is screaming, a shrill sound that reverberates in his head.

"Help! Oh my God! Someone, help! Please! Call the police!"

She screams long and loud. His hand shakes, trembling, slick with blood, his grip on the knife slippery; his left arm doesn't suffer the same problem.

Muscle memory, and she hits the ground beside the other woman.

He sits in their blood, vomiting and retching, their blood pooling around his knees like it's rain or mud instead of death. He throws up again, feeling dizzy. He's shaking so hard his teeth clatter, but the left arm holds him steady. The wind is cold where it brushes against the wet, slippery skin. He coughs and there's blood in his hair and his face and the smell of it stuffs his nostrils until he doesn't know anything but the metallic taste of salt and red. He wheezes.

It's been so long, so long since he heard a wheeze, since he heard the strained sound of air squeezing its way into a pair of lungs, and he grasps for the faded echo of a memory that threatens to vanish before he can remember where, how, when does he remember wheezing from?

He wheezes again and starts coughing, flecks of his own blood joining the red he's almost swimming in and a vague, bitter part of him realizes the metaphorical resonance, the swimming in blood, the blood that makes his joints slippery, he wonders if his left arm will rust away if he sits here long enough, turn to dust and crumble and take the blood with it, leave him alone with his right hand, the real one, the flesh one, the blood one, that's a fucking joke he could almost laugh at, as if any of him isn't blood, isn't death, even the metal arm that took the place of a hand that used to rub a curved back when wheezes and gasps interrupted the night—

He laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs and it's muscle memory, a reflex he forgot he had, inappropriate and maniacal, and the first laugh he's laughed maybe ever, and it's disgraceful to the dead and he laughs because he wants to cry, and halfway between cackles he realizes he wishes he could switch places with one of the dead women and wish on her his shattered memories and monster of an arm, maybe a dainty lady in heels would do better than the remnants of whatever it is he used to be.

He laughs, letting the air wheeze out of him as if he were exhaling his life force, and he sits in the pool of blood until it dries and becomes sticky, and he doesn't move, not once, even though the blood clings to his hair and skin and arms, pulling him down like arms reaching out of the grave, and he doesn't even remember to breathe, it's only muscle memory that keeps him inhaling and exhaling.

The last thing he remembers seeing is blue and yellow.

 

\------------------------------------------

 

There's a people bending over him, a myriad of faces that change and change and change but they all say the same thing when they open their mouths; reassurances, murmurs of you're safe, you're okay, nobody will hurt you, you're safe, you're safe, you're safe, he watches the ceiling turn blurry above him, beeps and talk surround him, he lays quiet and still, because this is familiar, this part is familiar, he knows what to do, and it doesn't smell like antiseptic, it smells like blood, and that's familiar too.

"Bucky?"

He hadn't noticed they finished and left him alone; he's sitting clean in clean clothes on a clean couch, there's a coffee table with a hot drink on it and his arm still prickles where they drew blood, he doesn't remember what they did to him but that itself is so familiar it's almost comforting, but the couch isn't. The couch is foreign, so he stands up, and feels perfectly fine, and that's even more unfamiliar, because there's no hunger or thirst left in him, he knows whatever they did to him put strength back in his bones and he could snap a neck or a cut an artery, and that, too, is so familiar it hurts.

"Bucky? Can you hear me?"

There's the man, the familiar man, somewhere in his mind he knows his name, but for now he's the man from the bridge, the man who destroyed everything familiar in him and left him this pitiful excuse for a corpse to  carry around his broken shredded mind, and there's anger and frustration in him but the man's only hopeful and he wonders why because he knows there's nothing he can give him, nothing he can say, nothing he can do that will live up to what this man hopes for, and the only thing he can do is something bad, something he's done again and again and again, and the idea feels good to him, feels familiar, because it involves the familiar scent of blood.

"Bucky, do you know where you are?"

He's wearing a shirt that fits him, it must belong to the black man, the flying one, who he'd failed to kill; another failure in his ledger, a tally mark on the wall of his brain. He wants to squirm because he can almost feel the man's memories, injuries, sentiments where his shirt touches his skin, and the idea itself is so discomforting it aches.

"You're in the Avengers Tower in New York. You're safe here."

Safe, safe, safe, echoes of familiar words, familiar sentiments, another room with a blonde man saying the same thing in Russian, English, French, German, it feels familiar, it feels right to hear, and he doesn't notice he pulled out his knife until he puts it away and that settles it, because they didn't disarm him, and it must be true, he's safe, but that's such a disorienting concept that there's a little bug in his mind scratching and poking at the logic of it.

"Do you know who I am?"

The face is pale, the face is familiar, the ugly kind of familiar that references a relationship to a person he doesn't remember being. But he does know the face, know the nose and jawline and eyebrows and ears, knows them because some long forgotten piece of him used to touch them gently with the hand he doesn't have.

"Steve." The word falls out of his mouth like it's made of lead, and clatters to the ground. It's unfamiliar in his mouth, but he sees it in Steve's face, that flicker of happiness, that remembrance of a man named Bucky that doesn't live in this skull anymore, but whose face he wears like a mask he's stuck in forever. "Captain America." A part of his mind remembers him as The Target, and though he doesn't voice this he knows he has no power to stifle that thought.

"Right," He watches a small smile appear on Steve's face as he beams like it's Christmas. He wonders how he remembers what Christmas is. "What do you want me to call you?"

There's thoughts, echoes of people he's supposed to be, faded memories of people with the same face in every mirror he looks in, he has difficulty remembering there's a common person in all of them, a common past he can't remember, can't control, a common chair he sat in to lose himself and everything he was, a common room with scientists in it speaking English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, every language he knows and every language he doesn't, jumbled in his head, he knows the Russian word for assassination, knows the Dutch word for target, but doesn't know the difference between the people he is and isn't, remembers people in lives he didn't have, remembers things he didn't do, people he didn't kill, couldn't have because he doesn't remember them, doesn't remember them but wakes up screaming with their blood on his hands, on his face, in his hair, stains of red under the nails of his right hand because his left hand is only metal where there used to be flesh, used to be flesh before it was lost, lost, lost but where, where did it land when he lost it falling from somewhere with someone screaming a name—

"I don't know."

He follows Steve's head as it nods slightly.

"Do you remember how you got here?"

He remembers the blue and yellow, the short term memory riddled with holes but still solid enough to know he was carried here by someone with two arms, two real arms, not whatever tinfoil passes for a limb these days. He remembers sinking into the gap between the arms, only to be held tighter, and then someone yelling, someone screaming.

"You carried me," he says.

Steve blushes slightly, pinkness only tapping his cheeks lightly before flooding to his ears and turning them bright red, like blood.

"Do you remember after that?"

He remembers a thousand things and has forgotten more than he'll ever remember again; he knows the names of a thousand targets but can't match them to their faces, and it's like that with this, he can't remember what happened or didn't, knows something did but it could've been murder, could've been fighting, could've been guns and knives and blood, could've been black heels and red hair or black skin and wings or black pupils of pretty blue eyes, and he doesn't know the difference between them, can't play spot the differences when he doesn't know what's alike or what's not even there.

"I don't know."

Steve blinks, his face falls ever so slightly before he nods gently.

"Do know how you’ve been treated here?"

He remembers familiarity, lying back and replaying a thousand versions of the same, a thousand versions of what was real and what was dead, and sometimes it involved needles and tubes and sometimes it involved reports and sometimes it involved cleaning the blood out of the chinks in the metal arm.

"No."

He can see the flicker of disappointment in Steve's eyes, and there's a childish satisfaction in disproving someone's hope, and it sends trickles of adrenaline to the outermost reaches of his brain, and it's as if he's flipped the switch on a thousand machines. He can feel himself, knows he's standing, feels the knives in his belt, looks at the hot drink and knows it's hot chocolate, looks at the mirrors and knows they're one-way, looks at the ceiling and knows that if he wanted to he could kill the lights and then Steve in maybe eight minutes, max, if he put up a fight. Twelve seconds if he didn't.

"They took some blood," he hears Steve say gently. "And recorded your vitals, and got some fluids into you. They cleaned you up and gave you some new clothes, and they didn't do anything to you or your arm. But you were critically underfed and dehydrated."

Dehydrated, dehydrated, dehydrated, dee high dray tihd, dehydrated, hydrated, hydrated, hydra, hydra, hydra, hydra, HYDRA, HYDRA, people standing over him telling him what to do, familiar, telling him about targets and deadlines, fallback plans, details, weapons in his hands, metal arm twitching when they poke at it with their machines, knives, training with knives, throwing knives, knives in throats, he killed one of them, waking up twenty years later, new words, new words clanging in his mind, cryo-sleep, the Asset, jumbling around in his head, he sees a mirror on a mission and collapses, hits his head and blood, blood, blood, there's blood on his hands, in between the chinks of his metal hand, dried and stale and smelling sweet like death, death, death, he deals it out like it's for free, hands it out like lollipops, gives it to a little girl, teenage boy, a president, a girl with a knife in her eye, a bullet through the stomach of a redhead, memories he doesn't recognize of doing this before he was whatever he was, a bullet in the head of some damn bastard in cameo in a trench that smelled like sweat and corpses where all he had to keep him company were his own tears and memories he had back then of someone—

"Bucky!"

There's a part of him remembers the word, knows the name, recognizes what it's supposed to be, connects it with the face in the mirror and the Smithsonian exhibit. It flashes through his mind, hitting bells as it passes, until his mind is a cacophonous mess of memories and thoughts he can't control, and he's awake, but it only feels like he's opened his eyes when he realizes he's pinned Steve to the wall and put a knife to his throat.

He pulls away reflexively, like a child who's been caught misbehaving. His right arm begins to shake uncontrollably, and he has difficulty sheathing the knife. The left arm clutches his flesh one, squeezing as if trying to tell it to stop, stop, stop.

"Stand down."

For a moment the steel in Steve's voice turns his limbs to fluid, and he steps back, anticipating further orders before he realizes the command was addressed to whoever is on the other end of the comm in Steve's ear. Thankfully, his slip-up goes unnoticed, and he watches Steve raise his eyes back to him.

"Sorry." He blinks when he hears the apology. Even cracked and shattered and jumbled as his mind might be, he recognizes the incorrectness of Steve apologizing instead of him. He doesn't respond, but there's a twist of something in his chest at the idea of being apologized to.

He watches Steve take a deep breath and say, "We want to help you."

If he hadn't long ago lost the ability to feel amusement he'd have laughed out loud; the very idea that he could be helped was matched in hilarity by only the idea that he knew what he wanted help with.

"How?" His voice is gritty, like he's been gargling knives, and his arm shakes so hard he feels it in his shoulder, he clenches his fist but it only trembles even more, and it takes him a moment to hear Steve over the sound of his own heart pounding in his head.

"We can help you get your memories back."

He forgets to breathe, muscle memory faltering as he feels a brief stab of hope, and it feels like a stab, feels like broken nerves and broken skin and blood flowing freely, because the thoughts flow freely, too, a thousand thoughts of inklings he could flesh out into memories, real memories, real scenes, and then the wound is infected because the inklings turn to rotten bullets in his skin, bullets with words carved into them that say murderer, murderer, children murdered, people you didn't kill but it was you, people you remember killing but it wasn't you, more and more blood on your hands even when there wasn't blood, even when you choked or throttled or poisoned their blood was on your hands—

Then there's that feeling in the back of his mind that tells him, that whispers in a snickering voice: _he only wants to help you because you're wearing someone else's face_.

He tries to suck in air, remembers to breathe, thinks of the face in the mirror and says, "I'm not Bucky."

Steve's face turns into an impartial mask, but not before he catches sight of a flicker of sadness, nostalgia, disappointment?

"We can still help you."

"How?"

There's no shield on Steve's back and he looks incomplete without it, like a sponge sucked all the color out of him. His jaw convulses when he swallows, but nothing in his stance or face betrays nervousness.

His left arm tightens around his trembling flesh one, and the metal is cold against his skin.

"You're hurting people," Steve's voice rings through his ears but he doesn't process that the sound is coming from his lips. He blinks and it aligns, the sound matching with movement like two puzzle pieces clicking together. "We can help you stop."

Stop? Stop the blood? Stop the bullets, the murder, the dead eyes in his nightmares, the screams he matches pitch for pitch in the night, the knives and bombs and guns, the arm throttling, the left arm, the left arm, the chair where they shoved a thing in his mouth for him to bite on when they tore through his brain like it was made of paper, set fire to him and everything he was and left only muscle memory, stop that?

"What if you can't?"

He hears the inhale of Steve's breath from across the room.

"We can. And if we can't, I won't let you hurt any more people."

He knows that he is wrong. He knows that he means wrong, that everything about him represents a sense of wrongness, because if he were right he wouldn't wake up screaming with dreams of people he hasn't killed, can't have killed, because it wasn't him, but whose faces haunt him regardless. He knows he is wrong because of the blood, but doesn't know who, who, who is wrong because he doesn't know who he is and he doesn't know half the time what's happening, what he's doing, he rides around in this corpse like it's a bumper car at Coney Island with someone who smiles a lot, and he doesn't know who this body belongs to, doesn't know how it works, but it's killed people and their deaths weigh heavy in his mind like dumbbells dragging him down in the middle of an ocean until nothing is real and there's no up or down but that doesn't matter because he needs air, needs it, needs to feel it in his lungs, doesn't know which way to go to get to it or how to breathe when he does reach it and their faces laugh at him while he drowns—

He doesn't know for sure if he's nodded until he sees the relief spread across Steve's face. And just like that, the tension in his chest loosens and he has a sort of epiphany that's part realization, part hope, and part question:

_Maybe?_

 

 


	2. Unfamiliar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next few hours are a hazy mess; he spends it like a madman in a cell, a dog in a cage, he paces without knowing why he paces, he walks and does push ups and even though the door is open he doesn't know what's supposed to happen. He rubs at his eyes until the redness leaves them, counts time by the number of sniffles until they're gone and he realizes he lost count. He can't remember the difference between one moment and the next when there's nothing to distinguish them except the knowledge of whether he put his left or right foot forward in his aimless pacing. He doesn't even know what the carpet feels like, or even if it is a carpet, he pays so little attention. He feels like there's a black hole in his stomach, sucking on the inside of the empty, starving organ until it's nearly inverted, and that itself is so familiar that he paces back and forth feeling it, trying to remember why it's familiar, trying to remember Brooklyn, trying to remember that room he knows was real, a room with two little beds pushed together in the dead of winter when they were both so cold and hungry they were woken in the dead of night by the other's stomach growling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please enjoy a whole 'nother chap of angsty Bucky and extremely slight subtext of literally every ship involving either Cap or Bucky. I worked my butt off for this chap, but don't worry; if you don't like it there's a whole new chapter full of plot twists and angsty interactions next week. Enjoy, and don't forget to comment, kudos, subscribe, bookmark, all of those lovely buttons.

He doesn't remember getting into an elevator with Steve, but when he gets out his foot hits the floor and it's as if he's suddenly jolted awake.

The apartment is small without being cramped, and Steve's shield leans on a wall in the hallway. He looks at it, remembering the feel of it in his hands, the weight of it, throwing it through the air as if it could slice through a person's neck, his left fist hitting it solidly, trying to fight around it, jamming a knife in wherever he could find a gap in Steve's defense.

He wonders if Steve will make a move towards it but, after peering sideways at him for a moment, Steve turns and walks down the hall, and he walks after him.

There are two rooms across the hall from each other, and Steve stops in front of them, looking back at him expectantly.

"Here's your room," he hears Steve say as he gestures at one of the rooms. He ignores the gesture and peers at both of the rooms. They're set up identically, a bed pushed against the wall with space for a nightstand, lamp, and closet, but one of the rooms has a radio and the walls are covered with papers. He steps through the doorway.

"That's not—" Steve can't stop him from entering the room, and doesn't try.

The wall is plastered over with papers, photographs, a few bits of string attached to thumbtacks that connect one clump of information to another; there's phone records and Soviet files and passports, gun sale records and eyewitness accounts, all of it feels like it's being shoved down his throat, he sees words like assassination and Soviet, everything typed up in a neat font that makes him want to vomit, so he does, he vomits in a wastebasket by the door and after a moment he feels hands hold his hair out of the way and it's like a foreign warmth. When he's regurgitated everything in his stomach and his throat burns like someone poured a vat of boiling cockroaches down it, he sees Steve's eyes, and they're kind, they're ridiculously kind and that's so disgusting in and of itself that he could throw up again.

Instead he catches sight of a photograph in the center of the web, all blue and frosty, and a face with its eyes closed is in the center of it, a face he's seen in every mirror he's ever passed, and it's almost helpless and weak and he turns away with his head swimming.

He doesn't realized he's mumbled an apology until it's out of his mouth. Muscle memory.

"It's okay," Steve's voice says in his ear, and he can hear the unspoken addition of a name he agreed not to call him. "You're okay."

With Steve's help, he finds himself properly on his feet, looking at the mess of papers roughly pinned and taped to the wall.

"I was looking for you," He hears Steve explain.

He doesn't respond, can't bear to because he sees the police reports with a photograph here and there, and there's blood in the photographs, and people, corpses, that seem so familiar, he can't remember them but they are familiar because he knows he killed them one day or one night when his mind was falling apart inside a body functioning on muscle memory.

"Hey," says Steve. "C'mon."

He doesn't realize how bad he feels until he pulls away from Steve and walks on his own, and his head starts aching, pounding in time with his heart, but he needs to walk, needs to be okay, needs to get away from these things that stab him in the chest where his heart is buried, and he remembers, even if it's the only thing he remembers, he remembers how to finish a mission.

His new room feels empty, like someone sucked the soul out of it, and it's so fucking ironic he could laugh. There's a bed and a nightstand, a closet and an empty bookshelf. There's nothing of import in this room, nothing to indicate any semblance of life or habitation, and that's so familiar that it slightly alleviates the headache pounding away in his mind.

"Lie down," Somewhere in the room, he would know where if his head didn't ache so much, he hears Steve talking to him. "You look like you're about to fall over."

"I'm fine."

"Lie down."

This time there's so much steel in Steve's voice that it's an order, a direct order, and it flips a switch in his mind that seems to bring clarity, because it's simple, it's easy, it requires only what he must give, and he lies down on the bed and the ceiling above him is pristine even despite Steve's sigh.

"No—" Steve's hair flops when he shakes his head. "Don't—don't do that."

Then the switch is flipped again and there's a flicker of confusion and irritation and a tinge of embarrassment because he understands it wasn't supposed to be an order, but it was said like an order in the tone of an order and it's like someone threw the rulebook out the window because they figured that since he memorized it seventy years ago he no longer needs it.

He sits up, and the room spins around him until it's clatters into place like a marble circling a drain after a careless child dropped it.

"I'm fine," he repeats, and the words sound better now that he's sitting down and can think without the room swan diving around him.

"We'll run tests on the blood we took today," he hears Steve promise. "Find out what's wrong with you."

"I'm fine," he snarls, but his throat still tastes like acid. The left arm clicks when he grips the metal bedframe. He sees Steve staring at it and it's familiar, it's déjà vu, the blue eyes fixated on the light glinting off the metal, watching it and waiting, he's seen it before on streets and bridges and in homes and bedrooms, eyes following the arm wherever it goes and sometimes it's the last thing they see, because the next moment he kills them, shoots them, has to clean their organs out from between the arm's metal plates.

"What?" He demands, and suddenly Steve's eyes flick away from the arm.

"Nothing."

He wonders if he would have made it this far, trusted Steve, followed him to his apartment, if he'd had his shield with him. He doesn't know, can only imagine, but he thinks of the shield and the memories it does and doesn't have, the memories of someone he never was, can't have been, because it's not in his mind or his memories or his thoughts, it's not filed away in a drawer, he doesn't even know if it got lost when they flipped over the filing cabinets of his mind and set everything on fire, fire, everything in flames, the kind of flames that threatened to swallow him whole in a burning building in Nazi Germany that he can't remember even though he still feels the heat of the flames, and oh God he's gonna die, he's gonna die, please someone help!—

He doesn't realize he's breathing heavily, the air humming slightly as it wheezes in and out of him, until he feels a hand on his shoulder and a voice in his ear.

"Hey. You're okay, you're safe. Just breathe."

And it's like a light in a storm, Steve's voice, and he tries to breathe correctly; he inhales and exhales but his lungs won't stop gasping for air, and he inhales, exhales, inhales, exhales, his lungs are suffocating and his mind, his mind is on fire, his mind is in a thousand places at once, a thousand places where he killed people, a thousand times he destroyed a life or made an orphan, he wheezes because that's it, that's the only thing he's ever brought into this world, orphans, and it's like a stab through the heart he doesn't have, because how could he have a heart and not have broken their control over him, how could he have a heart and rip out other people's organs with his bare metal arm—

He sits there on the bed, with Steve's hand on his shoulder and his voice whispering, for half an hour, not daring to look up even once he's got his breathing under control, because then Steve might see the red-rimmed eyes and flecks of tears, and if Steve saw him weak then he doesn't know what he would do. Then he feels like he could laugh, because after that little show there's nothing else Steve could be seeing but weakness, and there's such an impressive stab of shame in his chest that it turns him red, brings heat to his cheeks.

Steve says something, squeezing his shoulder, and leaves, and it's not until he's alone in the room that he processes what he heard.

"I'm going to help you. I promise you, I will help you, I—God, I—I'm going to find a way to help you if it kills me."

 

\------------------------------------------

 

The next few hours are a hazy mess; he spends it like a madman in a cell, a dog in a cage, he paces without knowing why he paces, he walks and does push ups and even though the door is open he doesn't know what's supposed to happen. He rubs at his eyes until the redness leaves them, counts time by the number of sniffles until they're gone and he realizes he lost count. He can't remember the difference between one moment and the next when there's nothing to distinguish them except the knowledge of whether he put his left or right foot forward in his aimless pacing. He doesn't even know what the carpet feels like, or even if it is a carpet, he pays so little attention. He feels like there's a black hole in his stomach, sucking on the inside of the empty, starving organ until it's nearly inverted, and that itself is so familiar that he paces back and forth feeling it, trying to remember why it's familiar, trying to remember Brooklyn, trying to remember that room he knows was real, a room with two little beds pushed together in the dead of winter when they were both so cold and hungry they were woken in the dead of night by the other's stomach growling. He knows somewhere it's there, that memory, that it's real, but everything in his mind is so jumbled, so broken and mixed together and messy, that he forgets, forgets that he knows it happened, forgets where he can find the memory.

The window looks out over the city, and in the darkness a spattering of lights form a sea of stars, and it's like nothing he's ever seen before because if he had he wouldn't even recall it anyway.

He doesn't know what happens, doesn't know what to do. For a while he does pushups, lets his short term memory take over, counting one, two, one, two, one, two, but he doesn't count higher than two, doesn't remember to, so he's done God knows how many pushups and only two, and it doesn't make sense but it makes perfect sense. He sits on the bed, stands up, he looks out the window again. He stands there for ages, eternities, millenia, watching the city, he's been here before, he knows, but when?, when did he come here? Was he born here, did he die here, no, that's not right, he doesn't die, he is death, that's the only way to explain that he's never brought anything into existence but orphans and widows, widows and orphans, and that reminds him bitterly of pulling a trigger and he doesn't push away the thought, he doesn't know how, it's hangs suspended from a noose in the middle of his mind, a reminding feeling of a gun in his hand, a bullet in the air, he doesn't realize what his arms are doing until he looks down accidentally and realizes they're in the perfect position to be holding a gun he no longer has.

The arm, the arm, it twitches and hisses, every movement means the plates realign and tick into a new formation, it's like watching a swarm, a military formation, it's flawless and terrifying and he feels, he feels, he doesn't know what he feels, he doesn't recognize feeling, he doesn't remember what it is, even though he knows he feels with his right hand, the flesh one, but it's so dizzying he can't think and it doesn't make sense.

The redhead, what's her name, the redhead. He sees her face. He sees her face and she's dancing, he remembers that, he knows it. She's a ballerina. He used to love watching her dance, and now, in the tiny room, he loves it even more, every move is graceful, her arms are strong and delicate at the same time, she tiptoes across the room, twirls, and it's like liquid music, serenity incarnate, she smiles at him, twirls, her hair falls free from her pin, and then her head falls free from her shoulders, rolls across the floor and her empty eyes roll around in their sockets and she's still smiling, there's blood everywhere, spattering across the room, he screams, it's on him, it's splashing across his face, spurting from the stump of a neck where a beautiful face used to be, and the body is still standing until it stumbles forward and he screams and there's panic in him and he tries to run, and it grabs him and he screams and—

"Wake up!"

His eyes fly open, he stumbles back, reaches for his knife, his knife in his hand, a face too close to his and panic, his heart beating so loud he can't hear or think and his lungs are collapsing and expanding so rapidly he doesn't know which is which, and his arms move without thinking, the left one pins someone down, he lunges and the right one presses a knife to Steve's throat.

"You're awake, it was just a dream," Steve's voice is in his ears but even though his eyes are open he doesn't see him, doesn't process his lips moving, doesn't know anything but the knife in his hand against Steve's throat. He remembers how good it feels, how familiar, to press, press, press, feel the blood spurt, slippery in his fingers.

"Let him go."

He hears a click behind him, someone cocking a gun, and Steve's eyes flash as he tries to speak.

"Sam, stop—" Steve swallows and he watches him wince when a line of red appears at his throat. He's pinned him against the wall, both of them breathing heavily, and he's soaked with sweat and fear and he feels like he could bleed to death and not care.

"Put down the knife."

Sam. The Falcon, the flying one, he remembers his silhouette and his fighting style. American military. Remembers fighting him, remembers blocking punches and kicks, remembers him coming out of the sky to kick him down, knows he won't fall for that again.

The gun presses into the back of his head, he doesn't realize his face is contorted with fear and anger and confusion until he sees the sadness in Steve's eyes, and it disgusts him, the idea of pity disgusts him, and he supposes that's the only thing left from when his body used to house Bucky Barnes, because he certainly didn't get pride from HYDRA, and that would make him laugh if there wasn't a gun to his head.

"Put down the knife," he hears the voice again and it sounds like someone, somewhere, that looked like Sam but didn't look like Sam, and it's both familiar and not and he's confused and he hates it, it's like scratching an out-of-reach itch. "Put down the knife and let the Cap go."

The gun presses harder into his head, and he snaps. He forgets time is passing, forgets the bullet could kill him, forgets the gun and the knife and the pale throat turning red under the blade, his left arm twitches, Steve's eyes flash, muscle memory and it's like wind, it's like air, like he jumped because suddenly the world is racing around him and everything is happening and he's moving, Steve is gone, the knife flips in his hand, black skin turning red, and he blinks, muscle memory, he hears the Falcon choking, gasping, and somewhere Steve is yelling at him and all he can think about is the feeling of the knife in his hand and what it would look like in the Falcon's eye, would the blood make him vomit when it's no longer a mission to fulfill—

"Bucky!"

It's like a lightning strike, he opens his eyes and his left arm is crushing Sam Wilson's windpipe, and sees Steve reflected in the window, there's horror in those blue eyes and it's like a stab to the heart he doesn't have, because if he did would he have a knife in his hand, gripped tightly, would he be so pressed against this man that he can hear a foreign heartbeat, feel his windpipe collapsing in his fist, imagine blood, imagine veins and brains leaking out of ears and children vomiting their insides out from poison, bullets in eyes, people screaming and shrieking, someone yells so loud he forgets it's a mission, there's a flicker of doubt before muscle memory, muscle memory, muscle memory, and his fist uncurls from the Falcon's throat and falls like it's made of cement instead of metal and he should feel something when he looks down at Sam Wilson, but it wasn't a mission and it wasn't a murder and there's neither fulfillment nor regret, and he doesn't feel a thing, anything, and he wonders if he should.

Steve holds his hand out for the knife and he doesn't say anything but the steel in his eyes, it's a command, and from the floor the Falcon wheezes and coughs, trying to straighten out the shape of his windpipe, and there's Steve's eyes focused so intently on him and the left arm and the knife, that it's painful. He feels like he could scream and he doesn't realize he's given up the knife until it's in Steve's hand and he realizes, muscle memory, and the steel is gone from Steve's eyes and he thinks he should feel accomplishment, victory, he completed the mission, fulfilled the requirements of the steel command, but he feels nothing, there's no approval in anything Steve shows him, he doesn't understand why, he was obedient, obedient, did what he was told, no need for punishment, no need to do anything to him, no need for the knives and the needles and sticks and chains, no need, don't need the blood, the guts, the scars, tubes in his arms, heart racing, flashing lights and then someone pushing him back, restraints on his arms, and it's the chair, oh God, please, no, I'll be good, please don't put me back in the chair—

He wakes up on the bed.

The sky is gray and pink outside the window, and the city's still a mess of colored dots, either a sea of them or a swarm, he doesn't remember the difference although he knows he should. There's something clunky on his head and the ceiling looks so far away that he feels like he's falling, he feels like he's sinking, the bed is too soft for him, it feels like he's lying on a marshmallow.

"Hey."

He watches Steve’s eyes flit around the room for a second before landing on his face, then the arm, then back to the face.

“How’s your head? You hit it when you fell."

He reaches up, he reaches up with the right hand, and the clunky thing on his head is a bandage, and he doesn’t realize his head hurts until he pokes it experimentally, but he forgets to wince and the pain just flashes through his mind like a bird past a window. It leaves a memory, short term memory, and it’s so odd to remember pain without feeling it in the moment and like a child he pokes the bandage again, and the pain’s so confusing; it’s familiar in short term memory, unfamiliar in the long term, they never hurt his head, wouldn’t want to damage that pretty little organ, that might fuck him up permanently, wouldn’t to do that now would we.

“Stop that,” His hand is batted away from his head by Steve.

“Did I kill him.”

It feels so wrong to be unsure, he’s never had to be unsure about a kill or a mission or a murder, not even in a war he doesn’t remember, he’s never had to be unsure whether the person he shot or stabbed or suffocated or exploded or choked was dead. Even the words sound unfamiliar in his mouth, there’s no muscle memory for this question, he has to think about the sounds before he says them, formulate them, run through the rules of grammar, tenses, vocab, pronunciation, throw the words together in the right order, and even then it comes out sounding like a statement instead of a question.

“No,” Steve rubs his eyes. He wonders if he’s been awake, waiting for him to wake up, the whole time. Must have been. There’s no one else who could have taken a shift. There’s bags under Steve’s eyes, and his hair is rumpled, it’s like a scene from a photograph he saw years ago and doesn’t quite remember enough to place where it’s from. “He’s in the hospital, but they say he’ll be fine.”

“You took my knife.”

“You gave me your knife.”

It’s so hard to explain it in his mind, so hard to explain that there was steel, so hard to explain that he has to obey the steel, doesn’t know how else to say it, doesn’t know how else to explain the unmoving conviction, the command, always present in the eyes of people who want things from him, doesn’t know how to say that if he doesn’t obey the steel there’s panic and panic and wild screaming and fear and oh God please no there’s pain and restraints and he’s good, he’s a good soldier, he always obeys, they make him obey, it’s so automatic it’s muscle memory, he doesn’t realize he’s obeyed until they smile and say good job, soldier.

He doesn’t feel remorse for the Falcon’s injuries. He knows the line between life and death is clear, and the Falcon’s still on the living side, so since it wasn’t a mission he didn’t fail and since there wasn’t a murder he didn’t destroy, Falcon will live, why remorse for that?

“How many languages do you know?”

That’s a fucking surprise if there ever was one. He’s never heard that question before, not from anyone standing over him smiling, not from anyone below him cowering, it’s like a bird flying around his head in circles, it’s odd and distracting and just plain wrong to him, he doesn’t even know the answer, the only way to narrow it down is to more than one, and that’s so misleading, he knows every language he needs to get a mission done, get any mission done, everything anyone says to him, every idiom or colloquial phrase, every order or command laced with steel, every snippet of scientific babble or plea for help, every label on a carton of explosives, he knows them all and it’s a better question to ask what language he doesn’t know but even that doesn’t have an answer, it’s a real-life plot hole and he wants to be anywhere else, anywhere else at all, anywhere else where he doesn’t have to do this, doesn’t have to dig through his mind to find things he doesn’t know, doesn’t know if he wants to know, doesn’t know if he cares, but then Steve, who’s neither smiling above him or cowering below him, he’s asking and it’s not an order, it’s a question, and it’s so foreign it tastes like dirt and ash, and he thinks he might faint.

“I don’t know.”

He doesn’t know if he says it in French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Ukrainian, Hindi, Swahili, he doesn’t know how many of those languages he does or doesn’t know, but whatever language he says it in, Steve understands, and nods.

“What about fighting? What kinds of fighting do you know?”

That question’s more familiar, he remembers people asking him that while they stand above him, steel in theirs eyes or their voices, asking him, and when he did answer it was only to say everything, he knows everything, and he knows that can’t be true, he remembers people with fighting styles he doesn’t know, punches and kicks, flips he never learned, but he can fight against them all and it’s so easy to just say everything when he can hold his own against whatever he comes across, he’s never had to say twelve or forty or two or eighty, never had to say names or labels or countries of origin or differentiate between one kick and another, he doesn’t know, doesn’t remember the difference between kung fu and karate and American military hand-to-hand fighting, doesn’t remember if he knows them or not but knows he can fight against them, knows he has the muscle memory, knows his body will move and time will blur and his opponent will be on the ground, and then it won’t matter how many fighting styles he knows when his opponent is dead.

“I don’t know.”

Steve nods.

“Do you remember killing the people HYDRA ordered you to kill?”

That’s a trick question if he’s ever heard it, he doesn’t remember who was or wasn’t HYDRA, doesn’t remember how long he was with them and how long he wasn’t, doesn’t remember being ordered to kill people, doesn’t remember orders to kill, doesn’t remember people, he remembers missions and targets and guns and people handing him files with photos and outlines and blueprints, he remembers the word HYDRA, remembers a mumbled motto in Russian, English, accented with every accent he could ever recognize, cut off one head and two more will grow in its place, remembers asking someone if he was a head, if he was one of the heads HYDRA grew to exterminate his enemies, remembers that was early on, so early, before he knew, before he learned, before he learned to fear, to fear what they did to snark and back talk and questions, to fear that flicker of annoyance people got when he talked or questioned or expressed resentment, hate, irritation, insubordination, oh God, he remembers what they did to insubordination, he remembers, they pushed him back, he fought at first and then he stopped, knew it would be over quickly, better to wait, better to clench his teeth, better to scream, curse, anything, over soon, just wait, this is what you get, you sonuvabitch, for questioning HYDRA.

He remembers waking up after that, every time, time after time, fresh and shiny like a new penny, with a file for him, no restraints, a gun pressed into his hand with an order, a mission: take out the target, there are no people in HYDRA, there are only predators and prey, he’s caught somewhere in between, he’s the weak-ass wolf who runs at the head of the pack because he’s got the sharpest teeth, so sharp, easy to sink into necks, easy to sink like bullets into flesh, under orders, under orders, always under HYDRA orders, but it wasn’t HYDRA who stabbed a baby in its crib, wasn’t HYDRA who dealt out death like unlucky cards, roll the wrong dice boys and girls and the big bad wolf will come and get you, over and over again, every bad kid, everyone, every threat, thousands or maybe dozens or hundreds, every single one, a bullet in their brains, every brain, every explosion, a thousand, a million, too fucking many, blur together in his mind, so damn many, so many, how could he ever remember them all, doesn’t remember who he killed, when, where, just remembers the feeling of the knife leaving his hand and sprouting in the target’s eye—

“Hey.”

Then Steve is there, his face is kind and gentle, and he feels disgust at the pity, but there’s hands on his shoulders and it’s so foreign and familiar, right and wrong, it’s like comfort and insult mingle together in a bowl and when he looks into it it’s Steve saying, as if he understands:

“Breathe. You’re okay. Just breathe.”

And it helps, and he’s disgusted, he used to be so much more than a shattered mirror in a church he helped blow up, he used to be great, whatever he was, whatever he wasn’t, and look at him now, he’s lying on a bed with someone who used to be a friend and an enemy and a target helping him relax when memories rush over him like a wave, slam him again and again against the cliffs of whatever it is his body does to him, adrenaline, panic, right arm shaking, he doesn’t know. But there’s Steve. Hands on his shoulders like a shock blanket. Kind eyes. Supports for his crumbling mind.

“I don’t know.”

“What?” He's confused by the incomprehension in Steve's eyes.

“I don’t know how many people I’ve killed.”

It’s like Steve’s seen the light, there’s a switch flipped and he speaks gently.

“That wasn’t the question.”

“What?”

“I asked: do you remember the missions?”

And that question. It’s so fucking simple to answer and also so complicated that it’s difficult to get the words out. The sounds taste like ash.

“Yes. And no.”

Steve nods and he looks for hatred, revulsion, pain, disappointment, irritation, affirmation, satisfaction, fists tightening, teeth gritting, jaw setting. But instead he only sees the blue eyes, and like candle flames they’re gently alight.

“It’s a start.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this fic has taken ahold of my life, and I'm officially working on uploading every week. Unless otherwise stated, I'll be uploading Monday nights, so your best bet would be to read it Tuesday morning at the earliest. Of course, please comment and kudos, there's not an artist in the world that doesn't want to know that their work is appreciated, and if you have any questions or suggestions about tagging, plot, grammar, mistakes, etc. please just leave a comment (i check them obsessively so don't doubt I'll see it).  
> Thanks so much for all the attention you've given the first chap, I hope you liked this one.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Calm down, blondie bear." The voice is gravelly, male, American, and sounds snarkily agitated, something he hasn't heard in forever, people are never snarky in the face of death, not in real life, no, in real life they beg for their mothers. "I ran the tests on the blood sample, and you owe me a favor, by the way, I'm not some lazy-ass biochemist with nothing to do but cater to your every whim."  
> "Get to the point, Tony."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one's a day late and a bit short, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. As always, if you like the fic please leave kudos, comments, bookmarks, subscribe, the whole deal: every artist, writer, musician, genius, amateur, expert, craftsman, doodler, student, professional, they all want to know their effort is appreciated.

Every morning, there's a sandwich and a pile of clothes on the chair next to the bed. It's like clockwork, no matter how uneven his sleeping is. Every night he goes to bed knowing he'll be awake enough tbe next day to catch Steve setting the sandwich and clothes out, but every morning he's woken by the dawn on his face. He eats the sandwich, but he can't bring himself to change clothes; the feeling of them around his skin is nearly familiar after so many hours, minutes, seconds, he's so desperate for anything familiar that he finds his body moving in time with actions he's done for years, his muscle memory reminding him of weapons and blades and how his hands move with them.

The sun is like a spotlight, it floods through the window and illuminates the room, illuminates the bed where he sits, his left arm moving, muscle memory, twirling a knife he doesn’t have, because it’s familiar and now, all alone, in an unfamiliar room, it's the only reassurance he has that he's still alive and it isn't a dream or a nightmare or a hallucination.

It’s like he’s in a coma, like he’s dormant, it’s like someone pushed the power button and left him like a smartphone, playing the music of clicks and whirs in his left metal hand, running background programs like heartbeats and blinking and breathing, but the screen’s turned off, his brain is asleep, and it’s almost blissful. No thoughts to interrupt the nearly-ceremonial movements of his hand flipping and flipping and flipping a knife that’s not there, but that his body, even the non-flesh part, remembers it so well that it’s as if it was.

He watches the window, and even though he knows the world is moving outside of it, the city looks so still and stationary that he can hardly believe it.

It's hours before he realizes his hand has started to hurt, and he's almost surprised by the feeling, it's not quite unknown enough to be foreign, but it's so unusual for him, he's been twirling knives, real and imaginary, for forever, he can't remember the last time he did it so long, so many hours in a row without rest, that it began to hurt.

He stands, he doesn't know why, and puts the imaginary knife in the real sheath on his belt. He remembers handing the real knife to Steve, regrets that now. He wishes he had the knife, if only to flip it absently, to watch the blade turn and turn and turn and the light glint off both the weapon and his hand. He doesn't know why he stood. He doesn't know what he should be doing. The room seems too small, and the world impossibly large.

Suddenly he stops, and it's like the buzz of activity in his mind halts, like his senses heighten. He hears something and it takes him a moment to realize that it's not in his head, it's in the hallway, and the change in him is instinctive, muscle memory. He treads quietly, his feet are lighter, his left arm doesn't move but the right one goes to the empty knife sheath on his belt, he hides behind the doorway and scowls when his knife isn't there, he hears his heart in his ears, everything in him is routine, it's as recognizable as the feeling of his own heartbeat, the feel of his muscles tensing, his hand at the knife sheath, he doesn't know whether it's with hope or fear that he thinks to himself, after everything will he have to fight again?

"…completely different from yours."

"How?" He recognizes Steve's voice, hears the steel in it, and it's like someone poured a bucket of cold water over him, a chill races down his skin, prickling the edge where his metal arm meets his shoulder, he fights every instinct that tells him to back down in the face of a commanding officer, remembers every time he disobeyed, every slap and punch and chain around his wrists, the feel of his throat closing up and a wild panic that's interrupted by the sound of the other voice.

"Calm down, blondie bear." The voice is gravelly, male, American, and sounds snarkily agitated, something he hasn't heard in forever, people are never snarky in the face of death, not in real life, no, in real life they beg for their mothers. "I ran the tests on the blood sample, and you owe me a favor, by the way, I'm not some lazy-ass biochemist with nothing to do but cater to your every whim."

"Get to the point, Tony."

"It's not great. First off, his metabolism's like a hummingbird on steroids; he needs more calories than you do, he burns through them like they're drugstore matches. Even besides that, he's got so many drugs in his system it's a miracle he's still standing."

"What were they supposed to do, do you know?" The aggression has faded from Steve's voice and it's like his tone stuck halfway between concerned and aggravated, and now that there's no steel to fight against, he has nothing to distract his scattered mind from focusing on tiny words. Drugs, drugs, metabolism, calories, miracle, they're words he's heard a thousand times, even if he can't recall the mouths that spoke them or the faces those mouths belong to, they're lost somewhere in his mind but the words echo and rattle around in his ears like marbles or coins or dice, and every time a word slams into his thoughts it's like a pinprick in his brain, brings to mind memories he doesn't have and it's so confusing he could scream, but he doesn't. Instead he listens.

"Keep him docile, as far as I can tell. Keep him confused. If they've remained in his bloodstream for three months, I have no idea how long they'll last. And there's no telling what he'll be like without them."

A sigh from Steve that yanks on his heartstrings. It sounds mournful and he wishes he could see Steve's expression, he feels starved for expressions, any expression on any face that isn't terror or fear or hatred or an ugly mug looking at him like he's the perfect weapon, he doesn't need that anymore, doesn't want it, wishes he could burn those memories but they're so soaked with unshed tears they wouldn't light if he tried.

"Sorry, Cap, there's more. Not only is he undernourished, underweight, with low blood sugar, etcetera, etcetera, but his hormone levels are majorly fucked up. He's got completely wacked levels of testosterone, growth hormones, adrenaline, noradrenaline, aldosterone, and thyroxin, and as far as I can tell it's upping his levels of aggression and physical abilities at the expense of his stress responses."

These words are even more familiar; hormones, aggression, stress responses, they belong to people in white coats who never touched him but stood in the background like extras in a movie or bugs in a meadow, never hurting or touching him, never ruining that beautiful perfection of brainwashed muscle memory, no, only watching and observing and making tick marks on clipboards and peering at him curiously while they rattled off words like "testosterone" and "adrenaline" as if he didn't have ears, talking as if they couldn't hear him scream. His heart pounds, and he nearly misses Steve's response.

"Tony, I didn't exactly major in biology myself."

"No, you were too busy getting shot at. Something fucked with his body, Steve, but I won't know for sure what it was or what are the long-term effects until I run some more tests, experiments, etcetera. Sciencey-stuff." There's a rambling tone to his voice, like he's waving his hand dismissively, and it's so unfamiliar, he hasn't heard ambivalent disinterest in forever, if ever, it feels like a cold shower on a hot day, like a shower of fresh words, fresh emotions, emotions not centered around him, but centered around not him, and it's like a holy experience, and it's so jolting his heart skips a beat and he doesn't know what to do.

"I'm glad you're enjoying yourself." The sarcasm drips from Steve's voice, he can see it slathered over the words, it reminds him of unintelligible remarks and snaps of a time so long ago he can't recall it, can't recall who said them or when or why, but they're there, frosted over with a hazy mist that obscures his memory, he blinks rapidly, trying to clear away a fog he can't see, can only feel with the little tendrils of his mind.

" 'Wow, Tony,' " The other man's voice becomes loud and dynamic, mocking and sickly sweet, and it's like syrup in his ears. " 'Thanks so much for running all these super boring tests in order to help my dear old buddy, the one-armed psychopath who tried to kill me shortly before he pulled me out of the Potomac River.' 'No problem, Steve, all in a day's work for the mighty Iron Man.' "

"Thanks. Any idea when you'll have the new test results?"

"Gimme a week, Banner's expertise, and six pounds of bagels."

"I owe you one, Tony." Steve’s voice sounds genuinely grateful, and it’s something he misses so much that he doesn’t know why, he doesn’t remember Steve even though he does, he doesn’t know him but for memories that feel like he’s watching them on a screen, but everything about his voice feels familiar, as if he heard it in a nightmare years and years ago. What else could it have been, but a nightmare?

"Yeah, you do, but for now just focus on getting Captain Hook back on his feet."

"Do the others know he's here?"

"Only Romanoff, Banner, and that idiot friend of yours who keeps stealing my bagels."

"Sam."

"Yeah, make him stop. He's getting on my nerves. How is he, by the way?"

Sam, that’s the name, that’s the name of the black man, the flying man, he remembers the gun behind his head and the Falcon's voice, a warning and a command, and there's no steel in it, it's more like a threat than an order, then he remembers his hand around a dark-brown throat and a horrible retching sound that mimics death itself, and Steve yelling.

"He'll be fine," Steve says. "The damage was minor." There's a pause for a moment. "I don't think Bucky wanted to hurt him."

It's like someone hit the brakes too hard and the whole world just stopped spinning, throwing him forward a thousand miles and rattling his head so much that he can't think; it's Steve's voice, it's Steve expressing faith and hope, it's disguting, it's so familiar it aches, it's familiar in every way, familiar to memories of DC and the Potomac River, familiar to memories of Brooklyn and Nazi Germany, his voice is like a light in the dark, it's like water in a desert, and his head seems to steady as if Steve's voice had locked him in place. But nothing is more perfect and wrong than that voice saying Bucky. The sounds of the word pick at the fabric of his reality, and he wants to yell and scream and vindicate Steve for this mention of a person he can't remember being.

"Cap, he put a man in the hospital."

"If Bucky had wanted to hurt him, he'd be dead, we both know that. Sam's good, but he's got nothing on Buck."

There's something like anger in his stomach, a flicker of irritation that someone smashed between hate and amnesia, and everything he hates about that Bucky he doesn't remember being, it all pours out like someone tipped over a mug or bottle or bucket, and he doesn't know which way his memories are going, but in the mess he catches a glimpse of a skinny boy in an alleyway, fighting a bully, and a memory of Bucky running to help. The memory's like a dream he's not sure even happened, he wishes he knew for sure it was real, he wishes he could hold it in his mind and relive it the way he can relive all the other memories, the freshest ones, the bloody ones, because there's feelings in that memory, tucked away on a shelf in his mind, that he wishes he could feel again.

So much is running through his mind that he wishes more than anything that he couldn't feel, didn't have to sort through all these emotions he can't identify.

"Sir."

He almost jumps when the new voice reverberates all around him, almost omnipotent, and strangely British. He nearly hits his head on the wall in a moment of brief panic before he hears the voice again.

"Sir, you should be aware that Captain Rogers' house guest is just around the corner."

There's a moment of silence where his heart seems to take center stage and dance haltingly. His breath evaporates in his lungs but he doesn't dare move, unsure of what the others will do.

"You can come out here," that's Steve's voice, and for a moment he forgets it's attached to a hulking body instead of a scrawny one twisted with asthma, scoliosis, fever, and shivering in the dead of winter so bad that there's no way to keep him warm but push the beds together and share the blankets because hell will freeze over before he'll let the punk shiver to death on his watch. "There's someone I want you to meet."

That sends a surge of unfamiliarity through him and all he can think about is that the last new person he met he strangled, choked, asphyxiated, funny words that echo the fact that he hurt, hurt, hurt the last person he met, and if it's not trepidation he's feeling then it's fear of what that left arm might do.

There's silence before he realizes they're waiting for him. He wishes he had his knife instead of an empty sheath strapped to his leg, wishes he had a gun or a bomb or anything familiar for him to flip in his hands for this, because this, this is unfamiliar. He doesn't know what to do with his hands, but the left one seems to move by himself. He wonders if that counts as muscle memory when there's no actual muscle in the metal. It swings, and the rest of his body seems to follow, stepping out into view.

The hallway seems infinite, even though he can see the far end. The light illuminates two figures; one is Steve, looking at him evenly, both expectant and hopeful, and it's almost irritating, and he's standing sideways, and looks from the second man back to him. The second man is shorter than Steve, less muscular, and less familiar, with dark hair that looks like he's run his hands through it too many times. There's a blue circle on his chest that makes him stare for a moment, but then his eyes flick back up to the man's face, and something seems undeniably familiar. Maybe it's the bags under his dark eyes, the black hair and mustache, the square-ish jaw, but no, he knows, it's that cocky smirk like he's just begging for a punch in the face to give him a reason to punch back.

A switch is flipped in his brain, and he speaks before realizing it.

"Howard."

The myriad of emotions that passes over the man's face is almost impossible, he recognizes frustration and anger and hatred and sorrow and vexation, and it's so blended that he can hardly tell where each one starts and stops. "Not quite, pal," the man says with a tight-lipped smile. He steps forward and extends a hand towards him. "Tony Stark."

"He's Howard's son," Steve explains.

He can see it, see Howard's eyes and Howard's jaw and Howard's hair and Howard's eyes, but there's something in those eyes that Howard never had, and he can only describe it as a shred of decency he knows comes from María. The outstretched hand puzzles him for a moment. He feels as if his mind's forgotten everything about being human, he can throw a knife but not shake a hand. He puts his own hand in Tony's, shakes it, it's more foreign to him than the other man is.

A chill runs through him, he sees Tony's eyes on the arm, the left arm, they're gawking and staring and it's familiar but completely different. There's nothing in Tony's eyes but intense curiosity, and it's so surprising he doesn't know what to do.

"Hope you don't mind me asking," Tony says as if to insure himself from whatever his reaction might be. "But that arm, how much strength exactly does it have? How much could you lift with it?"

"Tony," Steve growls, and it's half a warning and half a deterrent, but Tony ignores it.

The question is almost routine, he's answered it so many times in so many situations, so many versions in so many languages, he knows the answer in every unit of measurement, his mouth doesn't have to think before responding, "250 kilograms. Roughly 550 pounds."

Steve's eyes widen, and Tony laughs.

"How do you compensate for the shifting in weight while running?" He asks, excitedly, running his hand through his hair. "Does its movement counteract the imbalance between the two sides of his body?" The words are addressed to himself, in both awe and curiosity, and that's familiar, too.

"Tony," Steve says.

"Push me!" Tony says, stepping forward and spreading his arms out. "Does the strength come entirely from your arm, or is it propelled by movement in your body?"

"Wait," Steve says, stepping forward as if to prevent action.

He is puzzled for a moment, but realizes that he already had his hand outstretched, ready to push, and Steve’s movement was an interruption. But Steve's intervention is directed at both of them, and he faces the dark-haired, decent version of Howard Stark. "Tony, the impact could kill you."

"It's for science, Steve," Tony says. "JARVIS, get ready to measure force, time, acceleration, velocity, and impact speed."

"Are you sure about this, sir?" The voice reverberates in the hallway and it's only Steve's obvious exasperation that distracts from it's omnipotency.

"Opportunity of a lifetime, buddy," Tony says. He looks expectantly at the metal arm. "Ready when you are, big guy."

He hesitates; he looks at his hand in the same position it's been a thousand times, in that one moment before action there's visions in his mind of a thousand things, this hand around throats and in chests ripping out hearts, slinging people over bridges and out of windows, firing a gun when the right arm was dislocated, a bullet from that gun hit Steve, he remembers, this arm pulled the trigger that fired the gun that shot a bullet that tore through Steve's skin like it was softened butter, blood like water spurting from a fountain, he remembers, there were spots of it all over the helicarrier, he almost slipped in it when they were fighting and all he wanted to do was rip Steve's still-beating heart out—

He realizes his right arm is shaking.

"Breathe," Steve says quietly, getting between him and Tony. "It's okay, just focus on me."

He doesn't realize he's wheezing until he hears Steve's voice, and even then it's like sucking in air underwater, he tries to swallow and breathe, but all he can think about is the arm, that arm with the fist at the end of it that slammed over and over again into Steve's face like it was a hammer.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," the words are like hollow logs, they're dead and empty but he doesn't know what else to say.

"Don't be sorry, you haven't done anything," Steve says. "Tony, get out."

He looks past Steve to where Tony is shaking his head, and added to the panic in his head there's a rush of fear, fear of judgement, fear of hatred, fear for the sake of fear, fear those dark eyes might see through him to where blood and guts cling to the insides of his mind, fear Tony might see the death that follows him like a shadow and know he might be next, fear that he will run, run, run.

He watches Tony turn, his vision begins to go fuzzy when he sees that mouth, Howard's mouth, open, sound seems to come out he doesn't hear him, doesn't know why he doesn't hear. His head feels enormously heavy, and it's like something is weighing on him, like he's carrying a weight on his back, his neck, his chest, he feels like he's suffocating from the weight on his chest, he could swear there's nothing there but there must be, what else could be crushing his chest like it's a sponge, compressing his heart and lungs like they're melted chocolate, he remembers chocolate with Steve once in the middle of the night in a bedroom in Brooklyn with the beds pushed together and chocolate stains on the white sheets and Steve's face shining like starlight because it's been so long since they had any chocolate and seeing the smile is like the weight on his chest then was lifted and he wishes he could see it again if only to get this horribly pressure off his chest that seems to force his head to ache and swim and the world seems to spin like a ballerina, a ballerina with red hair, and he hears people talking, or are they yelling?

He forgets at what moment exactly he blacks out. Steve yells something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I, based on two hours of random research, took a few liberties regarding the medical technobabble, so if you have any issue with that feel free to express your irritation at my errors, and I'll fix it. Also: I'm hardly a therapist, and I don't have PTSD or flashbacks or panic attacks, so if you have any issues regarding my writing of Bucky's mental health, just leave a comment and lemme know. Same if you take issues with my writing of any characters or events, or even if you just want to say hi. I plan to have the next chap up next week at latest.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed that, and please leave kudos, a comment, anything; every writer wants to hear what people think! I'm debating whether or not to add more, so if you want more please tell me, and I hope to make a decision by next Monday, by which time I'll either upload another chap or not.  
> Also, please let me know if you want me to put warnings on this or on future chapters, especially regarding Bucky's thoughts and feelings, and if you have any issue regarding his mental condition (if you have info I could use regarding PTSD or amnesia, or if you think I did a particularly good or bad job, or if for trigger reasons you want more info on where I'd like to go with his mental state) please feel free to leave a comment and I'll be happy to address it.  
> Thanks so much!


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